A new product, launched on time and under budget
And a team teaching the company to do it againDECISION
Enter a new market
Curriculum Co. built its name in K–5 education. For years they refined and updated proven content, with tested processes and predictable outcomes.
Then they made a bigger call: build the company’s first product beyond its core market. The target was middle school math, an estimated $400 million market, growing more than 7% a year, faster than the wider market. New content, a new kind of student, a new kind of buyer.
REASONABLE RESISTANCE
Overwhelmed by options
Refining what you know is a different skill from creating what you’ve never made. The team had no product to model it on, no experience with Algebra’s tangled and contradictory standards, and no playbook for building something new.
The stakes were high and the ground was unfamiliar, so every decision got studied, second-guessed, and pushed upstairs to be safe. Choices that should have taken a day took two to six weeks. Leadership kept getting pulled in to rescue a team that had never needed rescuing before. And the worry underneath ran deeper than the deadline: whether Curriculum Co. could grow at all beyond the market it had mastered.
ACTION
Build the product + ways of working
- Agreed on how the team would operate, ten shared principles they actually revisited, not a poster on the wall
- Set a steady rhythm of meetings and check-ins that kept leaders informed without pulling them in to intervene
- Swarmed the whole team onto one priority at a time in two-week sprints, instead of handing work across silos and waiting
- Adopted a fast, explicit way to decide, where anyone could agree, agree with reservations, stand aside, or block, and everyone knew who owned the call
RESULTS
On time, under budget, company-wide
- The team ran as one unit on shared priorities, instead of a chain of functions passing work across silos
- Decisions that used to take two to six weeks started taking a day to a week
- The project drew the fewest interventions and hit the fewest problems of any team in the company
- Ways of Working were taught to other teams, becoming the company’s blueprint for launching new products
CAPABILITY KEPT
Ways of Working
Curriculum Co. kept a way of working that lets a team take on something it has never done and deliver it, without the executive rescue. Name the uncertainty. Swarm the priority. Decide fast, out loud, with someone clearly on the hook.
The leaders got their calendars back, and the company proved it can grow beyond the market that built it. Then they did the thing that proves a capability is really yours: they taught it to everyone else.
This could be your story.
Why wait? Let’s have a conversation (not a sales pitch) that gets your decision moving and producing results.